Generating print-ready documents to be printed by a printing system involves acquiring the information (content, graphics, production specs, etc.) required to view, process and output the desired document in an electronic form understandable by a print engine. Such systems can range from those that are simple and modestly expensive such as are well known to consumer users of personal computer systems, up to commercial printing systems that are capable of generating in the range of hundreds of pages per minute in full color. Most systems tend to have a high-level objective of printing faster. Generally, a print system receives a “job” to be printed. Each job is formatted in the system in a Page Description Language (PDL) such as PostScript, PDF, ASCII, PCL etc. Job parallelism increases the flexibility of the printing system.
In a Page Parallel RIP (PPR), jobs are consumed by a ‘splitter’ which identifies independently processable chunks of a given print job and distributes the identified chucks to individual RIP nodes, in a distributed environment, which process the chunks in parallel. Existing page parallel RIP systems may be Symmetric Multi-Processor (SMP), i.e., based on communication over a single bus, or distributed, based upon communication over an Ethernet, for example. When a RIP node crashes or otherwise goes offline, the entire PPR system faults. System recovery would be the same as for a serial system, i.e., the entire system brought back online and the print job restarted at the last printed page (or, in some cases, at the start of the last job). This may be acceptable in some print/copy job environments. However, as more and more devices move to a distributed environment comprising many RIP nodes such that a given job can be processed much faster in parallel, it is more and more desirable that PPR systems be fault tolerant and have robust recovery mechanisms.
Accordingly, what is needed in this art is a system and method for robust recovery of a page parallel RIP system having a plurality of distributed RIP nodes such that the RIP system becomes fault tolerant.